Oh, will it ever shake us.
It had been almost three months since I’d exchanged a word with my mother. I magically associated her sporadic improvement with your eruption in my life, and I didn’t have the courage to tell her you’d run off. Back in May I’d dodged a barrage of phone calls, and then I forgot her until last Thursday, when I was watching something harmless and ridiculous on TV—it’s like taking a hot bath; I could feel the self-pity oozing from my pores. They were showing a documentary about old people who waste away in their bedrooms, alone and bewildered, abandoned by children who no longer believe in rewards in the afterlife and have their hands full keeping themselves on their feet in this vicious life. The program was interrupted and the darkened screen reflected my image back to me, wearing little Magnum-style shorts, an old T-shirt (Batman), all five depraved fingers delving into the bag of cashews for another dose of cholesterol. My excuse was that African gusts of heat had invaded Barcelona (a wind that burned when it touched your skin), and I was in no shape to invest in an air conditioner. I felt prematurely orphaned, I jumped up, tense with genuine concern. I called my mother, twice; she didn’t answer, but since it was two in the morning I wasn’t all that worried; she must have been asleep. I felt better imagining how at breakfast she would have the pleasure of seeing my number recorded in the memory of her mobile, and I fell asleep.
Three days (and some fifty calls) later, I started getting really nervous, imagining her corpse sitting there in the living room rocking chair. I decided to go see her. I would have gone sooner, but the last time I’d visited I found her so improved I thought she must be breathing her last. I’d deliberately left my set of keys at the apartment so she couldn’t call on me in an emergency. I put on a linen jacket and went from Rocafort to Via Augusta by bus, up the shady side of Muntaner on foot, but I still couldn’t avoid the sweat starting to prickle. I almost collapsed at Pàdua, and I asked a taxi driver to take me up the steep narrows of Balmes. I was still moved by how the street opened into wider lanes before circling the rotunda to face Passeig de la Bonanova, which greeted me with a light that looked like gold dust. I had the taxi stop two doors before the Miró-Puig building, not out of nostalgia, but because I wanted to keep more of the last twenty-euro note I had to spend this month. It was disheartening, in order to pay the rent, to have to resort again to the waning mass that out of habit and convenience I continue to call my “savings.” And if Mother really was dead it still wouldn’t salvage my situation—my sister would refuse to sell the apartment. She wouldn’t even look for an elaborate excuse, she’d have enough just by smearing a few sentimental arguments on top of some other shit: prices were going down, the market was weak, she wasn’t willing to give up the family’s property just because of my lack of planning. Before I see any of that money, I’ll have to wait until the gonorrhea that stopped her giving birth spreads and cleans her out entirely, and she’s corroded down to her bones.
Four years earlier I would have been able to turn to one of the neighbors, but the area had been filled with German and Japanese executives and I didn’t know anyone. I saw myself reflected in the glass door, the same shank of hair as when I’d stood a few feet lower. It’s a characteristic of our class that we remain loyal to the same parting of our hair as we grow old; really, they should subsidize me as an endangered species. Since I left home, they’d redone the hallway half a dozen times: parquet, stucco, plastic plants.
I cupped my hands and saw the doorman’s empty booth, a Barcelona curiosity you can still see in the streets that radiate from Diagonal’s elegance. But no one had taken the trouble to plant a new Señor Man in the vacant space—that little guy who’d known how to change a flat tire on a bicycle, keep track of visitors, deliver the mail, scare my sister without moving a muscle, and dictate complicated orders over the phone. Crammed like a fake Chinaman with a woman and two strange children into a cramped dwelling; my mother must be the only one in the whole building who remembers his cold, subservient manner, his subaltern tone that suited the tiny furniture they lived among. You can’t blame the world for taking down a womanizer like my father, but that it would take the trouble to expel Man de Togo, the sort who watches the world from such a low vantage point he can scarcely glimpse reality…now that just seems like abuse. People like him should get to live for two hundred years as compensation. I buzzed the intercom, but my mother’s corpse didn’t answer. I looked closely at the grooves of the speaker; the African wind carried dry leaves, and I tried to interpret the message they held for me. It’s odd how the brain gets superstitious as soon as it feels impotent. I was already searching for Muñoz the locksmith in my mobile’s contacts list when I heard the creak of the buzzer.
My legs were trembling and I felt a coil of heat winding up my forearm, but I couldn’t allow myself a heart attack. However many nuts I may have swallowed that week, they had to bear with me for a couple more hours. I rested with my hands on my knees, my eyes fixed on the mailboxes; I couldn’t remember when my mother had removed Dad’s name. When I felt better I was overcome by a softer, nuanced version of the same nervousness I’d had back when his home was my home and there was always news to share, when I was a boy edging into life and the world extended only as far as my parents could see. Señor Man’s old booth was where the new tenants stored their folding bicycles, but the renovations and departures and new residents had not dissipated the familiar odor those walls gave off.
I didn’t dare take the elevator up. The door had to be opened from inside, and Mother might be moribund beside the sofa—it seems incredible, but those things happen to old people all the time. I opted for the stairs, six floors, and I heard how my organs churned inside me. When I reached the top it took me five minutes to catch my breath. I knocked on the door, then rang the bell: short rings, long ones, intermittent, continuous; I leaned on it to call forth an unbroken clamor. Nothing worked. I ruled out Muñoz, I wasn’t going to profane my parents’ home. Then my sister wouldn’t answer her phone—for all I knew she was in cahoots with social services to leave all the horror to me. When we were little and took the bus together, we’d play a game where we worked out what age I’d be when she turned ten, fifteen, the improbable eighteen: the same span moving along a changing series of numbers. But I’d been frightened at the thought of Mother passing forty, or of her seeing me at that age. Our relationship was based on a certain freshness, and whatever went on between an old lady and a mature man was sure to be polluted. I threw myself to the floor, as if a note might be waiting for me in the space under the door, or as if my fingers could slide underneath like flexible tentacles and reach up to the lock.
I heard a door open on the landing a floor below. My jacket was ruined.
“Your mother is in Berlin.”
I peered over the stairs. What was my mother’s corpse doing in Berlin? I gave the usual excuses to refuse the neighbor’s invitation to come in—I found the voice that came from her corroded vocal cords unpleasant—so she shouted my mother’s plan from the landing, and the story seemed to check out: she’d left the address of a small hotel, and my set of keys. She’d left her mobile at home, by accident.
“Some crackpot has been calling her nonstop. But if you want to talk to her I can give you numbers for Lucas and Bruno, her travel companions. It’s lucky she has them, they take her mind off things. No one ever comes to see her, I suppose you don’t have the time.”
A week later I went back to Bonanova, lured by my mother’s promise to cook my favorite dish. When she opened the door I was met by the smell of apricots. The walls were painted salmon, there was a new rocking chair, new cushions, and an air conditioner: she had invested in comfort. She greeted me in a robe that looked like an updated version of the uniform she wore when you first met her, after she unexpectedly emerged from the fog of pills. Instead of the stupendous rabbit paella glittering with saffron, she put a plate of sweet pork knuckle in front of me (Dad’s favorite). But even then I failed to realize she’d summoned
me there to read me my death sentence.
“I’m thinking of selling the apartment to the bank. They’ll get the freehold, but they’ll give me a juicy payment every month until I die. How about that?”
Now I know that people keep fighting until the end, that they move around just to reassure themselves (and prove to others) they’re still active, but her newfound energy was an unexpected aggravation. I’d convinced myself that savings plans weren’t for me, because I was fairly confident that my share of the apartment would ensure me a peaceful old age.
“You two are grown up now, and I could really use the extra money.”
What for, Mother, if you’re just going to die? What kind of irresponsible parents fall into ruin and sell off the inheritance just to buy some lousy appliances?
“You don’t look happy with the idea, Juan. I don’t understand, you’re always griping about how I never get out.”
She told me that she’d been going dancing every other day with the Lucas & Bruno social club. I didn’t ask her where she went, I didn’t inquire about her circle of senile dancers—my imagination jumped to scenes of robberies, sprained ankles, kidnappings, verbal abuse. I focused on what time she came home, and it turned out she never went to bed after eleven. She added a childlike smile, and I had to admit she couldn’t even come up with the same grimace as before. My real mother (the Mother from the past) was more formal; that saucy pout was a recent acquisition.
“Plus, girls get in free.”
On the nights she stayed home (because of rheumatism, or a cataract that left her half blind, or some other ailment of seventy-year-olds), she organized dinners, and they listened to music on her iPod speaker—the last thing I expected to find in our apartment.
“Sometimes I sing, and I hardly ever watch TV anymore. Just a Barça game now and then—I love Ricard’s little laugh.”
She got up to clear the plates, and it was true, Mother had a pretty voice. The story was that Grandma hadn’t let her have lessons, because in her house it was considered a profession for hussies. Of course, that may have been a tale Mother told about a cousin or friend, another ten years and I might not be able to ask her anymore. There are stories that move across the earth over a given period, they’re like bonds that tie communities together. Then they come untied, they get lost, give way to another current of history, how strange. I never told you about that, and it would have been lost: I used to fall asleep listening to Castilian songs that both saddened me and made me feel safe. Though I knew the sound came from my mother and I could just reach out and touch her, it seemed like those melodies came from great, unfathomable depths.
“I don’t have time to make you any dessert because they’re coming to pick me up at six today. Do you want coffee? Aren’t you going to ask me about Berlin?”
She didn’t ask about my sister or about you or Dad (what can I say, I can’t help but think a man like him should go on sparking conversation). She hadn’t exactly turned her back on us (she’d invited me for dinner, and I was the one who hadn’t phoned her in six months), but her two flesh-and-blood children seemed like an islet of detached land moving away from her. It didn’t feel like she was making the slightest real effort to fit us into her agitated present. She had only one photograph of me on display: that hateful shot from the day I took my first communion, in a Lacoste shirt and with ruddy cheeks, back when I could trace a deep parting, like a living groove, in the mass of hair plastered down with gel. Back when I could disguise myself, when I’d belonged to her.
She walked toward me, moving inside her sexless apron; she’d done something new to her hair and it looked good on her. I suppose I always knew she was a tall mother, buxom, attractive in her own way but too demure to be noticed on the playground where we boys were entranced by the racy clothes on the newly divorced mothers. Did she ever dye her hair blonde? She looks the same in all my memories, smoking slowly, in profile, distracted. She was alive, I could ask her; she was alive, though in an altered form. But I was going to let it pass, it wasn’t a conversation we would have. None of those feverish boys could understand the allure of understatement, the value of women who keep their beauty for their husbands’ beds. Dad must have had a grand old time with such a statuesque woman—that kind has much more skin, and I think their bodies run hotter. Plus, Mother would blush at the drop of a hat; he must have eaten her up.
Dad was so serious (he called me into his office!) when he told me four years too late about the secrets of the intimate union between men and women, dispelling all hope that they’d managed to conceive me without all that genital jiggery-pokery. His demeanor also convinced me that there would be further, similar meetings, and new explanations: at fifteen, twenty, past thirty. But he never did meet with me again, he didn’t pass on the rules of the game. Nor did either of them sit me down to explain patiently what was expected of me: not in my first marriage, nor during the second; and what good would it do me now that those episodes are closed (because you’re not coming back)? How quickly the dream fades.
“How was Berlin, Mother?”
She sat down with a hand in her pocket and a nice smile that hinted at private thoughts. What next, a boyfriend? For the love of God, Mother, it was already hard enough to imagine that after giving birth to my sister your body was alive enough for the conjugal struggle. Of course, we discover startling things about people in their forties once we join their ranks, and I’ve heard of eighty-somethings who get married in the old folks’ home and go off on cruises to Mallorca, though I’d feel more comfortable assuming they spend their nights counting stars. My mother’s insides now couldn’t be up for much; the fallopian tubes, the placenta, everything gets wrinkled like the skin on the face, but maybe the vagina was still in good shape, maybe rejoining the fray is just a question of what gets you going. They say that mothers can interpret the waves given off by their children’s thoughts, and maybe you think that’s absurd, but when I looked up, Mother was so red I had to avert my eyes and look out at some branches, long like feather-covered wings.
“See for yourself.”
And she tossed one of those touchscreen phones onto the table. She did it like someone laying down a hand of aces, so we probably were indeed playing at something with winners and losers. I had to concentrate because the icons on those crappy things are too small for my fingertips, but before I saw anything she whipped it out of my hands, a slightly unhinged tone to her laughter.
“How silly. I made a mistake. They’re on this one, Juan.”
She handed me a simpler mobile, but I waited for her to come back with the coffeepot before looking at the photos. The brew was very strong, and some of the grounds had come through the filter. She recited the names of all the monuments. Most of the images were blurry on the little screen, covered in a fuzz of snow, as if when we’re pushing seventy we no longer have a margin to go on pretending that we’re recording and saving ourselves for later: at that point we’re not seeking to recapture the past or disguise the onset of age, those images won’t protect us, we’re only looking for a bit of company before being left alone with the end of time.
I poured another glass of sherry.
“Take your time, finish the bottle if you want. I’m going to lie down. As I said, they’re coming at six to pick me up.”
I left the coffee and finished the sherry. Mother had forgotten the smartphone on the chair, and I swear I only picked it up to practice with those little icons. The photo folder was empty; she used it to record videos. I skipped over “Berlin” and “Berlin1” and “Berlin2” and “Berlin3,” and among the three files of “Party” I chose “Party2.” The background noise was a bombardment of shouts and sounds that gave me the physical sensation of arriving at a party where everyone else has been drinking for hours. The table was the same one where the “coffee” was now growing cold, and the sofa the same one that, twenty-five years earlier, I’d flopped onto after practice to rest. I didn’t know the woman who was dancing, writhing in catlike
contortions, or the pot-bellied man. They were lost in that no-man’s-land between fifty-five and seventy-five. The video was recent—there was the air conditioner. The man pushed his belly forward and the woman started to bend her knees and lower her shapeless behind until her eyes were at the height of his crotch. The background noise got louder, approaching pandemonium, and in the living room of our home she unbuckled his belt, freeing a mass of fat and flesh, and stuck her fingers into his underwear. I didn’t want to see any more. I dropped the phone and let the video finish with my eyes fixed on the greenish-yellow foliage of the banana trees. The sound went on for a good ten minutes.
What I did next was leave the glasses in the kitchen, wash my hands, and make sure the gas rings were turned off. I went down the hallway and into the bedroom to say good-bye. She’d fallen asleep with the TV on, something about a talk show host whom they suspected was an extraterrestrial, a subject I certainly want to look into further. In her apron-robe uniform, the sleepy expression on her face had relaxed her features and she was showing her vulnerable age again. The tiny lines that started at her upper lip were there, lines that were also beginning to show on my sister’s face: twenty thousand genes unleashing packets of information in the eukaryotic cells, working the flesh from within. With her hair messed up and in her stocking feet, she reminded me again of what she no longer was, what she in no way still was: a big, old doll they’d left there, half rotten.
Divorce Is in the Air Page 33